An Arctic nightmare . . . with only the crumbliest, flakiest mountain

THInGS have taken a worrying turn for Ben E. King fans. The Sixties soul singer is remembered for his hit Stand By Me, in which he promises his girl that together they can face anything . . . even if ‘the mountains should crumble to the sea’.

That’s exactly what was happening in Undiscovered Worlds (BBC2), as adventurer Steve Backshall went climbing in Greenland. The mountains had the consistency of a Cadbury’s Flake and they were falling to bits under his crampons.

The next line in the song predicts that ‘the sky that we look upon’ is about to ‘tumble and fall’.

In the Arctic, Steve and his team of mountaineers were scaling an unnamed peak that, he claimed, had never been climbed before. He kept telling us this was horribly tough, though it can’t have been made easier by his habit of letting go with one hand to film himself.

The rock was brittle, he said, because it has been compacted under thick ice for millennia.

Climate change has melted the snows, which gave Steve the opportunity to say virtuous but vague things such as: ‘If we don’t act now, it is our children who will shoulder the burden.’

If by ‘acting’ he means ‘showing

off’, then the planet is safe, because Steve deserves a nobel Prize for striking heroic poses. He made sure we saw him stripping off to wash in a torrent of melted snow.

Later, he walked barefoot over frozen sand: the message seemed to be that Greenland is like the Caribbean, if you’re butch enough.

Fortunately, his second- incommand was ex-Royal Marine Aldo Kane, a man so deadpan that a marble statue would seem positively hysterical by comparison.

We last saw Aldo in a BBC2 experiment called Body Clock, in which he was shut underground in a blacked-out nuclear bunker, alone for ten days. Most people would go crazy within 48 hours. Aldo barely even suffered from boredom.

Steve’s histrionics didn’t bother him. Quicksand, landslides and forced marches dragging impossibly heavy sleds left him unruffled. He did, though, take a mild interest in a musk ox. ‘ It’s like a cross between a rhino and a Shetland pony,’ he remarked.

But even Aldo wasn’t immune to the spectacular beauty of the remote landscape, with the low-hanging full moon giving it the aura of an alien planet.

More of those stunning horizons and less posturing from the presenter would have been welcome.

There was less showing off this week from Ms Margolyes, who made a thorough nuisance of herself in the first episode of Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure (BBC2). Sobered by her encounters with assorted Californians with an earnest belief they could achieve immortality by following one strange fad or another, she went in search of people with a more realistic attitude.

Miriam met a former teacher called Tracy, making the most of her final days by sipping gin and tonic at an idyllic cottage on the Scottish isle of Bute, and a 17- year- old rapper named Tyreese whose eloquent lyrics spat defiance at his cancer.

In Amsterdam, a euthanasia advocate going by the moniker of Doctor Death tried to persuade her that medically assisted suicide ought to be easily available. He demonstrated a coffin designed to look like a sci-fi rocket ship.

You got in, pressed a button and were suffocated by liquid nitrogen — great for the skin, presumably, but rather less beneficial for everything else.

Drowning in G& T sounds much nicer, thank you.